Australian Gun Control Doesn’t Work

Of course, proponents of civilian disarmament won’t see it that way. It’s not that gun control doesn’t work in Australia, they’ll say, it’s just that it doesn’t work perfectly. Even if there are guns in the UK’s former prison colony, there aren’t as many guns. And that means there’s less gun crime there than here. So there is better than here. See? No Newtowns! Well, since 1996. Sigh. Setting aside differences in demographics, geography and culture, there it is folks: thousands of illegal guns in a gun-free paradise. And those are just the heaters the coppers confiscated. Surprised? Only if you’re a willfully ignorant utopian or a secret statist. I wonder how many otherwise law-abiding citizens have tooled-up down under. The need for armed self-defense doesn’t stop when the government says it does. [h/t James]

21 Responses to Australian Gun Control Doesn’t Work

Something tells me these are coming in mostly by boat. I’m just surprised it isn’t mostly just Norinco clones. These criminals really want the good stuff and there’s nothing the government is doing to stop them. Better disarm the people to make the criminals’ lives easier.

To borrow from that excellent article, there were an estimated 800,000 SKS-type rifles and an estimated 1.2 million Ruger 10/22s in Australia before the gun buyback. 643,000 guns of all types were bought back.

Regardless of how many criminals are armed with guns, I want to know Australia’s total violent crime rates long before and long after they implemented their dracronian gun control. And I want to know all violent crimes regardless of weapon.

How many citizens were victims of violent assaults? How many citizens were rape victims? How many citizens were murdered? And I want to know the demographics. Maybe the murder rate declined slightly overall since their gun control … but if the murder rate of adults over the age of 60 tripled that is a horrific result.

Follow the link to a chart that compares violent crime rates for several countries, including Australia. This was produced by the Australian Government, specifically, the Australian Institute of Criminology. Violent crime increased after the ban. Go figure…

On Feb 12, 2013, the matrix was removed and the link redirected, with the following message “The Key Facts at a Glance content is being revised.” Apparently, the matrix didn’t tell the right story to support the current gun control agenda, so you now get a redirect. Don’t worry, the new, improved, stats will be available this summer.

This post seems to make the opposite point than I think you meant it to. No massacres. Sure, there are some illegal guns out there but no one is using them for anything besides maybe an illegal investment.

Except that random massacres aren’t where guns prove their true value or their true danger. Those events are vanishingly rare — and because they’re also unpredictable, they’re incredibly frightening.

The real value of guns is in their almost invisible, everyday presence. A prohibitionist society like Australia or the UK leaves the field wide open for garden-variety criminals to do their worst. Take a look at muggings, theft, armed robbery, home invasions, rape, and assault.

If you take away guns and those crimes don’t go down, then you haven’t fixed anything.

I dunno about anybody else, but I’ll accept a small increase in my already remote risk of death by gunshot in return for a huge decrease in the likelihood that my family gets victimized via rape or armed robbery.

An Aussie friend of mine (who is anti-gun) was telling me about the demographics of Australia recently. He said that 90% of the population is just in a few cities. There’s very little rural folks because there’s just not that much arable land for which to sustain large swaths of farmland. For this reason, gun ownership was really not that high to begin with.

“No Newtowns” isn’t quite correct.
2002 – Monash University shooting, a student armed with six handguns, shot his classmates and teacher, killing two and injuring five before he was tackled.
2000 – Childers Palace Fire, Robert Long deliberately started a fire at the Childers Palace backpackers hostel that killed 15 people (he hated backpackers).

There is more to consider than the absolute number of guns or absolute number of ‘gun crimes.’

My family lives in Australia and violent crime is rampant. Street crime, break-ins, rapes – everything. My family lives in a very nice area – similar to Malibu in California – and endure burglaries every couple of years.

Remove the guns, empower the criminals. Like it or not, without a realistic means of defense, the physically weak are the prey of the criminal.